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Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Golgo 13

Why isn't Golgo more popular here? My guess is, it's the art. Manga fans don't like Saito's art because it's old-fashioned and not moe (perhaps, since he uses a studio of artists anyway, Saito should license out Golgo and do a bishonen Golgo)and American comics fans don't like it because there's too many cartoony elements: sweatdrops, goofy expressions and big noses.

It's 'cus Luc Besson's The Professional ripped off Golgo's anime movie namesake, but went all sappy on it, and people want a killer with a heart of gold now. That, and casual readers had no recent domestic media property they could relate to on the same level as Golgo, until a certain George Clooney movie came along.

I'm going to celebrate by getting my own Golgo 13 underwear and wearing it as I read it.

Golgo 13 has tackled almost every imaginable topical subject, including a story about a manga artist (in which Saito proved incapable of drawing the artist's 'moe' artstyle)

Not to rain on this theory but the movie Luc Besson made was called "Leon".

Why, Duke Togo? Why? Why isn't Golgo more popular here? My guess is, it's the art. Manga fans don't like Saito's art because it's old-fashioned and not moe (perhaps, since he uses a studio of artists anyway, Saito should license out Golgo and do a bishonen Golgo)and American comics fans don't like it because there's too many cartoony elements: sweatdrops, goofy expressions and big noses. And frankly, by any standards, Saito's art is pretty stiff: in the early '70s it has a nice rugged cartoony look with lots of dark spaces, but in the more recent stories, it looks…well, like a dozen different people all drawing different parts of a manga and assembling them in a factory. And Saito always draws people with the weirdest eyelashes.

Although crime and 'noir' comics are popular in America, they all either have a super-serious, realistic art style, like Sean Phillips, or they're stylized in a certain way with heavy use of dark spaces, like Mike Mignola, Eduardo Risso and Frank Miller. When I asked American crime comics fans on Twitter why they didn't like Golgo, one guy just answered "Sanctuary!" as if a comic that came out more than 10 years before Viz's Golgo was somehow competing with it. But he's right: the plot of Sanctuary is just as over-the-top and melodramatic as Golgo but American readers instantly respected it because of Ryoichi Ikegami's photorealistic art, but they couldn't look past Saito's goofy artwork on Golgo. Even Lone Wolf and Cub had Goseki Kojima's beautiful brushwork. Artwise, the closest thing in English to Golgo 13 are probably oldschool "serious" newspaper comics, like Rex Morgan, M.D. and Dick Tracy.

GATSU wrote:

Quote: Why isn't Golgo more popular here? My guess is, it's the art. Manga fans don't like Saito's art because it's old-fashioned and not moe (perhaps, since he uses a studio of artists anyway, Saito should license out Golgo and do a bishonen Golgo)and American comics fans don't like it because there's too many cartoony elements: sweatdrops, goofy expressions and big noses. It's 'cus Luc Besson's The Professional ripped off Golgo's anime movie namesake, but went all sappy on it, and people want a killer with a heart of gold now. That, and casual readers had no recent domestic media property they could relate to on the same level as Golgo, until a certain George Clooney movie came along.

Not to rain on this theory but the movie Luc Besson made was called "Leon".

The company (Columbia?) that released it in the US cut about 30 minutes and renamed it to "The Professional".

To add to the confusion, the uncut version was eventually released as "Leon: The Professional".

Quote:

Golgo 13 has tackled almost every imaginable topical subject, including a story about a manga artist (in which Saito proved incapable of drawing the artist's 'moe' artstyle)

Okay, so I don't have a particularly strong interest in Golgo 13 (definitely enough to read through the article, at least)... but I'd really love to see what Saito's version of moe looked like. Any chance of anyone uploading a pic of that?

I literally just found out about the English Leeds volumes last week. I picked up three at the used bookstore I work at, and placed an order for the rest in English, because I LOVE GOLGO 13. I love that it has these long, well-researched storylines that did or could have happened, balanced with things like getting Princess Diana's driver drunk with a syringe full of beer. And that he is a perfect character. He has a set pattern of behavior that never changes, and regardless of the outlandish situation, he can be expected to act in a very particular way.

And I can really only do the manga. I tried watching a little bit of the anime, and somehow, I just couldn't get into the story adaptations. Similarly, I've tried the Assignment Kowloon movie, but Duke Togo made the transition into real life too easily, and it freaked me out that Sonny Chiba looked so much like him.

This is also one of the few manga series my roommate and I read together, volume by volume, as the Viz edition was coming out. If not for him, I would have been completely lost during the European politics tabletop game. He had to tell me all the chapter titles were D&D spells, and why it was the most awesome thing that could have happened when they rolled a 100-sided die to determine Golgo 13's success or failure.